A quick recap of Ivanti Interchange Unplugged Utrecht

Yesterday, the 19th of April, the first Ivanti Interchange Unplugged was held in the Netherlands. The Interchange Unplugged event was held in Utrecht and it was a beautiful sunny day to soak up a lot of knowledge. During the Interchange events (there are multiple world wide) Ivanti shares their vision on IT (Unified IT) and how the Ivanti product range can help you unify and streamline your IT. Because Ivanti has merged a lot of companies (Landesk, Heat, RES, Shavlik, etc.) under one roof they have a massive amount of solutions and tools to help you. So a good reason to go to an Ivanti Interchange event is to learn a lot more about the whole range of products.

My personal highlights of the Interchange Unplugged

First of Simon Townsend had a great Solutions Keynote in which he took us, the audience, through the complete Ivanti product range. It was really eye opening to see most of the products in action. During the keynote Simon also talked about the new Unified Endpoint Manager solution (not to be mistaken for User Enviroment Manager). This is really a come together of technology like AppSense and RES with AV, MDM and imaging technology.

A great thing I learned is that the new Unified Endpoint Manager now also supports Office 365 in non-persistend environments like Citrix VDI. It’s also good to see that Ivanti is thinking about the future and how their products work when you move infrastructutre to Cloud parties like Azure, AWS or Citrix Cloud. Which is a keypoint of the new Unified Endpoint Solution.

Another big point made yesterday is automation! My favorite product from Ivanti (formally RES) is automation. It is a robust automater which can almost do anything. And Ivanti is intergrating it in all their products. With this great power of Ivanti Automation it is possible that most Ivanti products will be able to talk to each other and execute tasks automatically, which of course is awesome!

During Simon’s keynote it was revealed that there are now new licensing options for Ivanti products.. First of all, licenses can now be bought on a montlhy subscription basis. Second, there is a new license which allows you to use all the Ivanti products. And third, Ivanti introduced a new Big Two concept license. You can now choose a license for two of the Ivanti pillars like UEM and ITSM and get a better deal. Further more Ivanti has a great reporting tool called Xtraction and can be used for free if you already own Ivanti licenses like RES ONE Workspace. Download Xtraction here.

During a break-out session I was able to check out Ivanti Patch, former Shavlik patch, and I was really surprised about the power of the product. With one simple console server installation you’re able to manage patches on your server. Not only for Microsoft patches but also 300+ vendors like java and Firefox secutiry patches. Further more the product is able to patch and update VM Templates and VM that are turned off. It can even take snapshots before applying updates! You can download a trial here and check it out.

All in all it was a good day and I had a lot of interesting talks and learned lot. When the next Interchange Unplugged will come to the Netherlands I will definitely be there.

For now I hope this was informative. For questions or comments you can always give a reaction in the comment section or contact me: